Building vocabulary starts by understanding how memory works,explains Scott Thornbury"I'm not 100% convinced that memorising the dictionary is the best way of improving your vocabulary," says the character played by Hugh Grant in Woody Allen's film Small Time Crooks. Yet why not? whether you could memorise the dictionary - or even the 5000 most common words in that dictionary - wouldn't that give you a huge advantage? Researchers estimate that a core vocabulary of between 2000 and 3000 high-frequency words is probably enough to push learners over the intermediate plateau. So why don't we insist on them memorising these words, or from day one,and as quickly as possible?As an example, a New Zealand friend of mine who studied Maori asked me recently what I, and as a language teacher,would make of his teacher's method: "We just carry out masses of words around a theme, for example, and family or food. We have to memorize these words before the next lesson,then we advance back and have a conversation approximately family or food etc, using these words. The teacher feeds in the grammar that we need to stick the words together." He added that he thought the method worked a treat.
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Source: theguardian.com